Every parent whose kids went to a midnight premiere of the new Batman movie had to feel a chill Friday morning when news bulletins of the shootings in Aurora, Colo., greeted them at breakfast. This time, senseless mayhem left 12 dead and as many as 50 injured.

President Obama said he was shocked by the shootings. He shouldn't be. Mass killings are becoming all too routine in the United States. This horror could have happened at Cinearts@Santana Row, AMC Cupertino or Camera Cinemas Los Gatos, where Silicon Valley young people and even some elders ventured to watch midnight premieres. We have had our own shooting sprees, most recently at Oikos University in Oakland and, in 2011, the Lehigh cement plant in Cupertino,

The sad fact is that America is doing next to nothing to curb gun violence.

Obama promised to develop a new approach to gun safety after the 2009 attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson. That horror gripped the nation and even briefly muted inflammatory rhetoric in our political debates. But the president has been remarkably silent on the issue ever since. If he plans to make better gun control laws a part of his campaign to win re-election in 2012, it will be news to voters.

Republican contender Mitt Romney, who once advocated some gun control measures, has flip-flopped on this, like so much else. He now professes to be a strong supporter of the Second Amendment and seems likely to push for fewer limits on firearms.

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New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was on target Friday. He called on Obama and Romney to respond to the shootings by giving details of their plans to improve gun control. We'll second that.

But there's another dimension to this challenge. Very little is known about the alleged shooter, 24-year-old James Holmes, but he had to be suffering from some sort of mental illness to go on this sort of rampage. Yet states, including California, persist in cutting mental health programs that can help the mentally ill curb violent tendencies and can flag clients who may be a danger to society.

Tougher gun control laws or better mental health programs might not have prevented the Colorado tragedy. But we'll never know, for example, if better background checks on gun buyers might have made a difference if we can't even explore the issue. Gun regulation has become so politically toxic that even objective scientific study is impossible. The last comprehensive public report on gun safety was conducted nearly a decade ago. The National Academy of Sciences pleaded for Congress to allocate more funding for further research, concluding that the available information was "too weak" to support any recommendations. No way.

Something is gravely wrong in America when we stop seeking objective evidence to help remedy a growing public safety matter. When the grief over the Aurora victims has abated, we must not forget them and go back to business as usual until the next gunman strikes. And the next.